Probably true. Go has a far more simple language specification, but it's not as if Scala is particularly alien.
> If you don't have a lot of experience with Java and the JVM, Go also avoids that whole avalanche of complexity, apart from Scala itself.
Why is Java or the JVM an 'avalanche of complexity' for Scala?
There's just an enormous amount of stuff to learn, and most of it is required-but-incidental; none of it (except Scala, in our example) is an inherently necessary part of getting from learning to a production system running Scala on the JVM, but you will end up having to become conversant with many of these things, and probably dozens of similar infrastructure and tooling systems.
[1] Haha. I was thinking this was mainly between Oracle's and openjdk, because that's what seems easily available, but it looks like there are four or five currently updated JVMs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Java_virtual_mach...
> Which JDK do I use[1]?
The Oracle JDK (which is the same as OpenJDK FYI).
> What happens when one library I want to use recommends a different JDK than another library I want to use?
There is a 3-month period or so every three years when a new major Java release is done when some developers of enterprisy libraries might want to do some more testing before making a recommendation. It's not a big question in the JVM world at all, and it's definitely not a big problem even for early adopters.
> Build tools questions: ant, maven, gradle?
SBT. You're building a new Scala project.
> most of it is required-but-incidental; none of it (except Scala, in our example) is an inherently necessary part of getting from learning to a production system
You would have been right five years ago. Today, many people run Akka/Spray/Play projects in production just fine without deeper devops knowledge necessary than with other runtimes.
Ah, that's because that was the only place I've had much experience with Java and Scala. We wanted to use Elasticsearch (Java) from our CMS (Java), and the recommended way to do that (at the time: embedding ES in your application as a search-only node) turned out to be infeasible, due to ES and the CMS (which was started in 2006ish) being unwilling to share any specific JDK without a lot of code changes to the CMS. We ended up building a system involving RabbitMQ and a thousand lines of PHP, as the easiest solution. :(
So, yeah, I recognize that a lot of my bad feelings about JVM languages are not particularly relevant to green-field development, whether in Java or Scala. I just got ranty. Sorry.
